Solving an industry-wide challenge

Despite the global push towards Industry 4.0, many companies are lagging behind even as governments everywhere are pushing for automation and adoption of smart technology. Automation has traditionally been expensive to implement and requires highly-trained expertise and one of the major factors hindering the adoption of robotic automation is the high technical competency required of robot programming and a lack of skilled technicians who can do the job. Across the industry, almost 75% of the total lifetime costs of a robot comes from software and programming related expenses, and the high barrier to entry meant that the industry often had to face costly, and unreasonably long development and deployment schedules for robotic systems.

Overcoming barriers through industry breakthroughs

Acknowledging that it was an industry-wide challenge that needed to be solved, Augmentus co-founders Yong Shin and Daryl set out to build Augmentus, to lower the barriers to entry to automation and allow more companies to leverage on robotics. The team have experienced the challenges faced in automation first hand, both having extensive experience and knowledge in automation, and the complexities involved in robotics. Yong Shin, in particular, was previously a technical lead at the A*STAR Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre and had developed enterprise solutions during his time there, including robotic arm programming and robotic inspection systems. 

Today, Augmentus is a robotics technology startup that offers the world’s leading unified, full-stack and code-free robotic automation platform, enabling non-technical users to develop robotic systems with high speed and accuracy. The team has made several breakthroughs in their platform development, such as ensuring extensive hardware compatibility with their platform, simplifying the user interface for industrial robot programming, developing a collaborative cloud architecture and creating an integrated AI model builder.

Initial challenges and future plans

Despite the challenges faced at the beginning as the team tried to acquire their first users, the team was able to impress clients with their vision and first product, and has continued to develop the Augmentus platform with learnings and inputs from their pilot partners. 

The global pandemic has accelerated the urgency for automation, and the Augmentus team has seen a rise in demand for their platform as companies adjust to a new work environment. Augmentus is currently preparing for a full product launch by the end of 2020.

Team

Leong Yong Shin, Daryl Lim